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Fringe Wrap up

Rating: NNNNN


The Fringe Festival just keeps growing. With 100 companies — the 101st, a Nepalese group, dropped out when its members couldn’t get visas — the 12th annual Fringe brought in a box office of $195,000 from an audience of over 40,000. The hot shows? Lear’s Daughters, The Rise And Fall Of Vella Dean, Easy, Slut and The Real Year 2000.

Here’s the first annual NOW Fringe wrap-up list:

OUTSTANDING NEW PLAYS Icara, by Ned Dickens Easy, by Ian Carpenter.

OUTSTANDING PERFORMERS Heidi Weeks Brown (Slut) T.J. Dawe (Labrador) Carol Lempert (The Camino) Bruce Beaton (Icara) Shoshana Sperling (The Rise And Fall Of Vella Dean).

OUTSTANDING PERFORMERS Heidi Weeks Brown (Slut) T.J. Dawe (Labrador) Carol Lempert (The Camino) Bruce Beaton (Icara) Shoshana Sperling (The Rise And Fall Of Vella Dean).

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLES Now The Day Is Over Lear’s Daughters Easy She Never Bought Me An Easy Bake Oven Happiness Channel The Real Year 2000.

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLES Now The Day Is Over Lear’s Daughters Easy She Never Bought Me An Easy Bake Oven Happiness Channel The Real Year 2000.

DELIGHTFUL DISCOVERIES Sleepy Jean, a poignant memory piece that wedded text, movement and sound, written and performed by Sarah McDonald and Emily Hurson and directed by Cathy GordonMarsh The Young Visiters, based on an 1890 “novel” by a nine-year-old girl and performed with comic charm by adapter Julie Tepperman and her fellow George Brown students and Slaves Of Starbucks, Peter Aterman’s darkly funny look at corporate greed.

DELIGHTFUL DISCOVERIES Sleepy Jean, a poignant memory piece that wedded text, movement and sound, written and performed by Sarah McDonald and Emily Hurson and directed by Cathy GordonMarsh The Young Visiters, based on an 1890 “novel” by a nine-year-old girl and performed with comic charm by adapter Julie Tepperman and her fellow George Brown students and Slaves Of Starbucks, Peter Aterman’s darkly funny look at corporate greed.

ON THE FRINGE’S FRINGE

ON THE FRINGE’S FRINGE

House manager Chris Sheasgreen delivered performance poems — different according to time of day — to get audiences to contribute to Tip The Fringe buckets.

On the day the new Harry Potter novel appeared, a father had to tell his son to put away the book and watch a Kidsvenue show.

Looking like aliens, dozens of spandex-suited volunteers distributed free Cool Mint Listerine “oral care strips,” ensuring that thousands of Fringers had pleasant breath when they gossiped on line.

Eric Woolfe won this year’s 24-hour play-writing competition with a piece called Pomeranski Rex, a comedy with roots in Greek tragedy. Director Kelly Thornton led a staged reading of the play on the Fringe’s final night.

Sonja Mills, editor of the daily Fringe Harold, not only compiled the newsletter and wrote much of its copy, but also hand-delivered it to each Fringe venue. Now that’s commitment.

Fringe Wrap up

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